“I don’t know why this is a surprise to the world. Age Discrimination was only ever going to allow individuals to take more cases against companies, it was never going to sort the problem. We all find a way to get the person we want for our company and sometimes that person needs to be younger because of what we need them to do and as we get older we are less likely to want to do these things. My experience has been that older individuals just don’t have the same hunger and drive which again even speaking for myself, is not the same as what it was when I was 20 years old, which sometimes the job needs that to deliver! In my world I have to say individuals are not rejected because they are older, but they are rejected if they feel old, so if they haven’t got the sense of pace, energy and fitness the role requires. We meet a lot of over 50’s and in general only about 30 percent of them really have the desire and energy to do the job, as well as the fact that IT literacy speed is needed in most jobs which many of them don’t possess to this degree. And by the way, I have met a 30 year old who can feel too old to deliver too, so age itself has so so little to do with the decision.
I can give you an example. We are recruiting a sales person at the moment and the social networking required is massive for this role, so the right person will already have been engaging on LinkedIn successfully with a good network. Of the over 50 applicants, only 1 of them has a profile which would even come close to the stage where we think we can teach him how to do more on LinkedIn! Is that discriminatory, that the others don’t qualify because they aren’t using a tool proficiently that we expect? Yet as a company we can’t train it. Even when I have raised this with the individuals themselves, they say they don’t believe in using these tools for business development and want to do things the “old fashioned way”, now who is pigeon holing?
I believe the right people get the right job and we need to stop as a world making all of these rules, as all we end up doing is wasting money on cases which mean so very little and or giving people another way to make a claim as to why they didn’t get a job. This means no accountability if being taken and more importantly they are not trying hard enough to get a job. These individuals who claim more often than not, they wouldn’t have gotten the job anyway for other reasons, but guess what, now they can sue and get some money, which means they don’t have to work for a bit longer.”
Comment based on original article: “http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/over50s-still-facing-discrimination-in-jobs-market-despite-equality-laws-35465520.html“
